The link between maternal and child verbal abilities: An indirect effect through maternal responsiveness

Language abilities in early childhood show stability over time and play an important role in the development of other cognitive processes. Identifying modifiable environmental risk factors is important to informing prevention and early intervention efforts. Maternal verbal ability has been previously linked to child verbal ability. The current study examined whether maternal and child verbal abilities were linked indirectly through early childhood maternal responsiveness. Data come from a longitudinal birth cohort study. Participants included 133 mothers and their children recruited from maternity wards shortly after birth. Maternal verbal ability was measured using the Vocabulary subtest from the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, Second Edition (child age 8 months). Child verbal ability was assessed using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (36 months). A latent maternal responsiveness variable was estimated using three developmentally sensitive indicators; one during infancy (child age 8 months) and two when children were 36 months. Results of a structural equation model indicated a significant indirect effect from maternal verbal abilities to child verbal abilities through maternal responsiveness. This indirect path was significant even after inclusion of another indirect path from maternal executive functioning to child verbal ability through maternal responsiveness (which was not significant). Future studies will benefit from experimental, genetically sensitive and/or cross‐lagged designs to allow for conclusions related to directionality and causality. This body of research has implications for the study of the intergenerational transmission of verbal abilities and associated skills, behaviours and adaptive outcomes.     

Behandlung einer bipolaren affektiven Störung im Rahmen einer psychiatrisch-stationären Mutter-Kind-Einheit

psychopraxis. neuropraxis - Zeiten von Schwangerschaft und Geburt stellen eine Phase von erhöhter Vulnerabilität für psychische Erkrankungen dar. Nach der Entbindung können...     

La Bella Figura: The role of a cultural philosophy on Italian consumerism

The La Bella Figura concept extends to many Italian cultural dimensions including physical appearance, perception of self, and behaviours. La Bella Figura plays an essential role in shaping Italian consumer behaviour and consumerism. The current study sought to understand how women living in Italy conceptualize La Bella Figura and how it affects their day‐to‐day lives, attitudes, and consumption behaviours. This research extracted concepts from Consumer Culture Theory to construct a qualitative codebook and structure thematic data analyses. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 30 women aged 18–50 years living in Florence, Italy. Participants were recruited through study flyers, social media, and snowball sampling. Open and axial coding were facilitated by HyperRESEARCH 4.0.1 software to generate key themes. Data were collected and analyzed by trained researchers living in Florence, Italy, who utilized grounded theory techniques to identify emergent themes. Results indicated various components of La Bella Figura contributed to consumer behaviour, namely its influence on identity (i.e., appearance, confidence), lifestyle goals (i.e., health, consumerism), and social norms (i.e., perceptions of others, media). Findings offer practical recommendations for marketers and retailers to appeal to the Italian market through effective and informed mediums.     

Police officer job satisfaction in relation to mood,well-being,and alcohol consumption

The authors examined job satisfaction, job stress, and thoughts of quitting in relation to positive and negative affect, life satisfaction, self-esteem, and alcohol consumption among police officers. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that 2 dimensions, positive affect and negative affect, provided a clear family-tree organizational framework for representing the otherwise confusing pattern of associations between job and well-being variables. Job satisfaction was primarily associated with positive affect, life satisfaction, and self-esteem; job stress was primarily associated with negative affect and alcohol consumption; thoughts of quitting had moderate loadings on both factors. The 2-dimensional framework may prove useful as a guide in reviewing research in this field and in selecting constructs and measures for inclusion in future research.     

Face recognition by hand

We investigated participants' ability to identify and represent faces by hand. In Experiment 1, participants proved surprisingly capable of identifying unfamiliar live human faces using only their sense of touch. To evaluate the contribution of geometric and material information more directly, we biased participants toward encoding faces more in terms of geometric than material properties, by varying the exploration condition. When participants explored the faces both visually and tactually, identification accuracy did not improve relative to touch alone. When participants explored masks of the faces, thereby eliminating material cues, matching accuracy declined substantially relative to tactual identification of live faces. In Experiment 2, we explored intersensory transfer of face information between vision and touch. The findings are discussed in terms of their relevance to haptic object processing and to the face-processing literature in general.     

Auditory temporal processing deficits in children with periventricular brain injury

The present study investigated whether auditory temporal processing deficits are related to the presence and/or the severity of periventricular brain injury and the reading difficulties experienced by extremely low birthweight (ELBW: birthweight <1000 g) children. Results indicate that ELBW children with mild or severe brain lesions obtained significantly lower scores on a test requiring auditory temporal order judgments than ELBW children without periventricular brain injury or children who were full-term. Structural equation modeling indicated that a model in which auditory temporal processing deficits predicted speech sound discrimination and phonological processing ability provided a better fit for the data than did a second model, which hypothesized that auditory temporal processing deficits are associated with poor reading abilities through a working memory deficit. These findings suggest that an impairment in auditory temporal processing may contribute to the reading difficulties experienced by ELBW children.     

Action-based and vision-based selection of input: Two sources of control

In the first part of this paper we review evidence suggesting that there exists a mechanism that selects input on the basis of its similarity to the required action. This response-based input selection differs from the more established space- and object-based input selection in that it is not constrained by the structure of the input. Our evidence suggests that the two-choice Stroop effect is caused by this response-based selection mechanism. By contrast, it is known that the flanker effect is determined by the space- and object- based selection mechanisms. We explore whether the conflict resolution of the Stroop and flanker tasks is different as well by embedding these two tasks in a PRP (Psychological Refractory Period) paradigm. We show that the Stroop and the PRP effects are additive whereas the flanker and the PRP effects are underadditive, suggesting that the processes in charge of the conflict resolution in the Stroop and the flanker tasks are indeed different. We discuss possible reasons for this difference, and discuss possible ways in which the response-based mechanism can be implemented in information processing models.     

Pharmacogenetics: ethical issues and policy options

Pharmacogenetics offers the prospect of an era of safer and more effective drugs, as well as more individualized use of drug therapies. Before the benefits of pharmacogenetics can be realized, the ethical issues that arise in research and clinical application of pharmacogenetic technologies must be addressed. The ethical issues raised by pharmacogenetics can be addressed under six headings: (1) regulatory oversight, (2) confidentiality and privacy, (3) informed consent, (4) availability of drugs, (5) access, and (6) clinicians' changing responsibilities in the era of pharmacogenetic medicine. We analyze each of these categories of ethical issues and provide policy approaches for addressing them.     

Win-shift and win-stay learning in the short-beaked echidna (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Tachyglossus aculeatus</Emphasis>)

Numerous previous investigators have explained species differences in spatial memory performance in terms of differences in foraging ecology. In three experiments we attempted to extend these findings by examining the extent to which the spatial memory performance of echidnas (or "spiny anteaters") can be understood in terms of the spatio-temporal distribution of their prey (ants and termites). This is a species and a foraging situation that have not been examined in this way before. Echidnas were better able to learn to avoid a previously rewarding location (to "win-shift") than to learn to return to a previously rewarding location (to "win-stay"), at short retention intervals, but were unable to learn either of these strategies at retention intervals of 90 min. The short retention interval results support the ecological hypothesis, but the long retention interval results do not. Electronic Publication